Category: Games
Just wondering what the correct model of Iran is here
Prior to the war, I linked to a tweet from Matt Yglesias which explained why Matt opposed the war, and I expressed my agreement with his stance. While I feel plenty has gone on which I do not observe, I can report that the course of the war did not change my initial assessment.
Then I read many, many commentators saying how good the final deal was for Iran, and what a major loss it was for Trump. I was never sure I understood all of the parameters of the full deal, but still I did not hold any directly contrary opinion to that.
And now I see Iran is attacking ships in the Strait again, talking openly and brazenly about building nuclear weapons, and making plans to have tolls/fees on the Strait. To be clear, only the first of those surprises me, the latter two do not.
But given their reckless behavior in what is supposedly a wonderful war outcome for them, what is the correct way to model what they would have done had Trump and Netanyahu not attacked? And what is the correct way to model our optimal response to that? The terrible things that are happening now, do they not reflect an underlying equilibrium that would have emerged anyway within a few years’ time, or do we hold some hypothesis here of extreme path-dependence, suggesting the Iranian government would have been less bellicose on more or less a permanent basis? To cite one particular example of a possible equilibrium, if drones permanently alter the balance of power in the region, the ways in which their current position is now more aggressive might have emerged in any case. Or if the military have the strength to be the natural successors to the mullahs, might that not have happened over time anyway?
I do not see many war critics engaging with these questions openly and explicitly. It seems to me that the war critics implicitly are relying on a model of extreme path-dependence for Iran’s behavior. Had Trump not attacked, they might have stayed in a more peaceful groove for some while to come. That model might be true, but I do not feel I know enough about Iranian politics to make that judgment. Why are the others so convinced that model is true? Are they such well-informed experts? Is it that they have the properly sunny sense of the underlying Iranian disposition? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Does fasting harm cognitive performance?
More than 2 billion people participate annually in Ramadan fasting, making its potential effects on cognitive performance important for workplaces, education and high-stakes decision-making. We study these effects in tournament chess, an incentivised, real-world cognitive task in which move quality can be evaluated objectively by a strong chess engine. We analyse nearly 300,000 games and more than 25 million moves played by almost 10,000 expert players from 178 countries over 10 years. Two validation exercises support our Muslim-status classification, covering almost 11% of the sample and survey evidence indicates substantial Ramadan fasting compliance among Muslim chess players. In the preferred intention-to-treat specification, using pre-game controls, player fixed effects and year-month fixed effects, we find no impact of Ramadan fasting on Muslim players’ overall move quality or shares of optimal and nearly optimal moves, with tightly bounded estimates around zero. Muslim players make 0.13 additional percentage points of large errors during Ramadan, but this small estimate is fragile across alternative measures, samples, Muslim-status definitions, fasting-compliance adjustments and event-study diagnostics, with no evidence of heterogeneous effects, selection bias, or compensatory behavioural adjustments. We conclude there is little robust evidence that Ramadan fasting broadly impairs cognitive performance among expert chess players.
That is from a recently published paper by Samuel Buckland and David Smerdon. Some claim that people think best when they are just a wee bit hungry?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Conversation with Dave Baszucki
Dave is CEO and co-founder of Roblox, and here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary:
With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.
Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he’s skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son’s experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he’ll learn next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What percentage of your games now do you feel are beautiful?
BASZUCKI: All of them.
COWEN: Some look just quite ordinary. They might be fun, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, right?
BASZUCKI: Well, I was trying to go a couple levels out of the box on you there. The reason I feel they’re beautiful is when you said that, I immediately went to look and feel, but then I tried to imagine the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or the 30-year-old struggling to build something wonderful and the human connection to those games. By that definition, I think they’re all beautiful. They are all the efforts of creation of real people trying to pour their hearts out to make something that other people love to play.
On an artistic basis, I think you could ask me what percent of paintings in the MoMA do I think are beautiful. I’d probably say 20 percent. If I had to look at 1,000 Roblox games, I wouldn’t name which is more beautiful to me because I think that’s less important than really the heartfelt work of all the creators.
COWEN: I’ve been struck when I look at gaming at how much people don’t seem to care much about the visual beauty of their games. I would have expected something different, say, 15 years ago, and they just want a game that engages them somehow. Normal standards of visual beauty seem to have fallen away. Is that incorrect? Would you correct that impression in some manner?
BASZUCKI: I think you’re absolutely correct. What I feel you may actually be describing, if we looked into other disciplines, the evolution of story from the campfire to written to audio to a movie, and the increasing fidelity; all of those stories, in a way, are beautiful, but at the time, for the vast majority of the creators, it may be that writing is just easier than producing a 4K Hollywood movie. I feel that’s a little bit like the metaphor you’re talking about right now in gaming.
For the vast majority of people, their story or their idea for their game is actually pretty beautiful. Whether it’s a fashion game like Dress to Impress or it’s a grow garden game, the games are arguably beautiful, even if they don’t look photorealistic. What I think we’ll see is, over time, as AI helps accelerate the ability to make games look really polished in any style the creator wants—could be photorealistic, could be anime, could be a Warner Brothers 2D cartoon look—you and I might say that looks more beautiful, but the core gameplay is still somewhat the original gameplay. I think we are going to see games arguably look more beautiful, even though I think they’re all beautiful.
The dialogue is a bit slow to get underway, but there are many interesting parts.
Dwarkesh!
It’s been great to see Dwarkesh Patel rise to the top ranks of podcasters. The profile in the NYTimes is excellent. Dwarkesh’s success is his own but I couldn’t help but smile at the early, wacky GMU influences—all of which I can attest are true:
Mr. Patel recorded the first episode of “The Lunar Society,” his original name for the podcast, from his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020, during the early months of the Covid pandemic, when he was 19. He was taking online classes, bored, and thirsty for intellectual engagement. So he did what any normal college sophomore might do and cold-emailed Bryan Caplan, a member of George Mason University’s famously libertarian economics department. In the email, he described how three Caplan books had shifted his perspective on immigration, education and how many children to have. Mr. Caplan responded encouragingly, and after a further friendly exchange, Mr. Patel asked if he could interview him for a podcast. Mr. Caplan was impressed with the result. “He wasn’t just repeating 10 questions from everyone else. He had his own close-reading questions.”
Mr. Caplan and his sons happened to spend a couple of months that summer in Austin, staying at the home of Steve Kuhn, the billionaire ex-hedge fund manager. Mr. Patel had lunch with Mr. Caplan nearly every day, and joined him at Mr. Kuhn’s house for pickleball (Mr. Kuhn founded Major League Pickleball), intellectual salons and role-playing games, including the Mr. Caplan-written “Badger and Skinny Pete,” based on two “Breaking Bad” characters.
Mr. Kuhn offered to invest in the podcast in return for equity. “Even at that age,” Mr. Kuhn says, “he in some ways commanded the room in ways not many people do.”
…Early on, when all Mr. Patel had to show for himself was a couple of blog posts and one podcast episode featuring Mr. Caplan, Anil Varanasi, co-founder of Meter, a network-infrastructure company in San Francisco, reached out and asked how much Mr. Patel would need to keep doing what he was doing for six months. (Mr. Varanasi, a former student of Mr. Caplan’s, has made similar overtures to other promising young people.) Not much, said Mr. Patel, who was then living with his parents in Austin. Mr. Varanasi sent him $10,000. Mr. Caplan opened the door to other interviews, including Tyler Cowen and other George Mason economists. Mr. Cowen, through his Emergent Ventures program, himself later gave Mr. Patel a grant.
The rest as they say is history.
Solve for the equilibrium
Trump: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Here is the rest of the message.
The Public Choice Outreach Conference!
The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday June12- Sunday June 14 , near Washington, DC in Reston, VA. Lots of great speakers including Tyler, myself, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Jon Klick, Shruti Rajagopalan and more.
Please apply and encourage your students to apply.
How Matthias Blübaum can win it all
He is playing in the current Candidates tournament as the lowest-rated player, a mere 2693. It is considered a semi-miracle that he qualified at all, and he is not given much chance of winning the tourney.
And yet a path to the top remains.
First, he has not lost any of his first four games (all are draws), so he is hardly a weakie.
Second, and for my purposes more importantly, the tournament has winner-take-all rewards. So many players will be taking chances to try to move into the lead. Yet in chess positive expected value big chances are hard to come by, so often players, in their determination to top the standings, will take modestly negative expected value big chances, especially in the opening phase of the game.
Now, if you are willing to take a negative expected value big chance, will you prefer to do so against the top players in the tourney, such as Caruana, or the lower-rated players, such as Blübaum? The answer is obvious.
So he will have his chances.
The Candidates’ tournament
Caruana and Sindharov have won today, obviously boosting Caruana’s chances as favorite (he beat Nakamura, the number two rated player in the tournament). Yet what the chess world needs right now is not a winner, but rather a greater sense of legitimacy for the world title. Ideally the same person should win a championship match two or three times in a row, and with a decisive margin. They do not have to be as good as Carlsen, just clearly better than everyone else. Nepo never quite made it, Ding has retreated from the chess world, and Caruana has yet to win a first title. Is he young enough to win a few in a row? Or are we waiting for Nordirbek Abdusattorov (or someone else) to enter the cycle? I fear decisiveness is not soon on the way. There are several (relatively) weak players in this tournament, so a variety of players can win just by beating up on the weakies, rather than by demonstrating mastery over their strongest peers. Legitimacy is likely to remain uncertain, to the detriment of the chess world. But soon we will know more.
What should I ask David Baszucki?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
David Brent Baszucki (/bəˈzuːki/ buh-ZOO-ki; born January 20, 1963) is a Canadian-born American entrepreneur, engineer, and software developer. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Roblox Corporation. He co-founded and was the CEO of Knowledge Revolution, which was acquired by MSC Software in December 1998.
Roblox (/ˈroʊ.blɒks/ ⓘ, ROH-bloks) is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. It was created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004, and released to the public in 2006. As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
So what should I ask him?
One view of Iranian strategy
Some observations and comments on Trump and Israel’s war on Iran:
1. Tehran is not looking for a ceasefire and has rejected outreach from Trump. The reason is that they believe they committed a mistake by agreeing to the ceasefire in June – it only enabled the US and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months.
2. For a ceasefire to be acceptable, it appears difficult for Tehran to agree to it until the cost to the US has become much higher than it currently is. Otherwise, the US will restart the war at a later point, the calculation reads.
3. Accordingly, Iran has shifted its strategy. It is striking Israel, but very differently from the June war. There is a constant level of attack throughout the day rather than a salvo of 50 missiles at once. Damage will be less, but that isn’t a problem because Tehran has concluded that Israel’s pain tolerance is very high – as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US.
4. From the outset, and perhaps surprisingly, Iran has been targeting US bases in the region, including against friendly states. Tehran calculates that the war can only end durably if the cost for the US rises dramatically, including American casualties. After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran says it has no red lines left and will go all out in seeking the destruction of these bases and high American casualties.
5. Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran’s past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war. Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite – despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.
6. One aspect of this is that Iran has now also struck bases in Cyprus, which have been used for attacks against Iran. Iran is well aware that this is an attack on a EU state. But that seems to be the point. Tehran appears intent on not only expanding the war into Persian Gulf states but also into Europe. Note the attack on the French base in the UAE. For the war to be able to end, Europe too has to pay a cost, the reasoning appears to be.
7. There appears to be only limited concern about the internal situation. The announcement of Khamenei’s death opened a window for people to pour onto the streets and seek to overthrow the regime. Though expressions of joy were widespread, no real mobilization was seen. That window is now closing, as the theocratic system closes ranks and establishes new formal leadership.
Again: The question “How will this end?” should have been asked before this war was triggered. It wasn’t.
That is from Trita Parsi, via B. Note that some people consider Parsi a biased source (not sufficiently anti-Iran?), in any case it is worth pondering how other parties may view the current situation.
The chess culture that is India
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official FIDE rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days.
Born in 2022, Sarwagya — from Sagar in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh — has been rated by FIDE, the international governing body of chess, which requires a player to score points against at least five rated opponents in official events.
The toddler’s first rating of 1572 is considerably above the minimum rating of 1,400, having won five of his eight rated matches. As detailed by chess.com, Sarwagya’s victories have come against opponents including 22-year-old Abhijeet Awasthi (FIDE-rated 1542), 29-year-old Shubham Chourasiya (1559) and 20-year-old Yogesh Namdev (1696).
Sarwagya has broken the record held by another Indian child, Anish Sarkar, who set it at three years, eight months and 19 days old, in November 2024.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Samir Varma.
LLMs Position Themselves as More Rational Than Humans
That is the title of a new paper by Kyung-Hoon Kim, I differ from his terminology (“self-aware”), but the results are interesting nonetheless:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) grow in capability, do they develop self-awareness as an emergent behavior? And if so, can we measure it? We introduce the AI Self-Awareness Index (AISAI), a game-theoretic framework for measuring self-awareness through strategic differentiation. Using the “Guess 2/3 of Average” game, we test 28 models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) across 4,200 trials with three opponent framings: (A) against humans, (B) against other AI models, and (C) against AI models like you. We operationalize self-awareness as the capacity to differentiate strategic reasoning based on opponent type. Finding 1: Self-awareness emerges with model advancement. The majority of advanced models (21/28, 75%) demonstrate clear self-awareness, while older/smaller models show no differentiation. Finding 2: Self-aware models rank themselves as most rational. Among the 21 models with self-awareness, a consistent rationality hierarchy emerges: Self > Other AIs > Humans, with large AI attribution effects and moderate self-preferencing. These findings reveal that self-awareness is an emergent capability of advanced LLMs, and that self-aware models systematically perceive themselves as more rational than humans. This has implications for AI alignment, human-AI collaboration, and understanding AI beliefs about human capabilities.
Here is the Twitter version of the argument.
The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
My excellent Conversation with Nate Silver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver’s tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnosticism, the meta-rationality of risk-taking, electoral systems and their flaws, 2028 presidential candidates, why he thinks superforecasters will continue to outperform AI for the next decade, why more athletes haven’t come out as gay, redesigning the NBA, what mentors he needs now, the cultural and psychological peculiarities of Bay area intellectual communities, why Canada can’t win a Stanley Cup, the politics of immigration in Europe and America, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: If you think about the Manifold types in terms of the framework in your book, how they think about risk — is there a common feature that they’re more risk-averse, or that they worry more? Is there a common feature that they like the idea that they hold some kind of secret knowledge that other people do not have? How do you classify them? They’re just high in openness, or what is it?
SILVER: They’re high in openness to experience. I think they’re very high in conscientiousness.
COWEN: Are they? I don’t know.
SILVER: Some of them are. Some of them are, yes.
COWEN: I think of them as high variance in conscientiousness, rather than high in it.
[laughter]
SILVER: The EAs and the rationalists are more high variance, I think. There can be a certain type of gullibility is one problem. I think, obviously, EA took a lot of hits for Sam Bankman-Fried, but if anything, they probably should have taken more reputational damage. That was really bad, and there were a lot of signs of it, including his interviews with you and other people like that. It contrasts with poker players who have similar phenotypes but are much more suspicious and much more street smart.
Also, the Bay Area is weird. I feel like the West Coast is diverging more from the rest of the country.
COWEN: I agree.
SILVER: It’s like a long way away. Just the mannerisms are different. You go to a small thing. You go to a house party in the Bay Area. There may not be very much wine, for example. In New York, if the host isn’t drinking, then it’d be considered sacrilege not to have plenty of booze at a party. Little things like that, little cultural norms. You go to Seattle — it feels like Canada to me almost, and so these things are diverging more.
COWEN: Why is belief in doom correlated with practice of polyamory? And I think it is.
SILVER: If you ask Aella, I guess, she might say, if we’re all going to die or go to whatever singularity there is, we might as well have fun in the meantime. There’s some of that kind of hedonism. Although in general, it’s not a super hedonistic movement.
COWEN: It seems too economistic to me. Even I, the economist — I don’t feel people think that economistically. There’s more likely some psychological predisposition toward both views.
SILVER: I guess you could argue that society would be better organized in a more polyamorous relationship. People do it implicitly in a lot of ways anyway, including in the LGBTQ [laughs] community, which has different attitudes toward it potentially. and if there’s not as much childbearing, that can have an effect, potentially. I think it’s like they are not being constrained by their own society thing that is taken very seriously in that group. There’s enough disconnectedness and aloofness where they’re able to play it out in practice more.
That creeps a little bit into Silicon Valley too, which can be much more whimsical and fanciful than the Wall Street types I know, for example.
Recommended. Here is my 2024 episode with Nate, here is my 2016 episode with him.
My entertaining Conversation with Annie Jacobsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can’t replicate Israel’s Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she’s surprised domestic drone attacks haven’t happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.
Excerpt:
JACOBSEN: I quote him in the notes of my book, and this is perhaps the only regret I have in the entire book, that I put this quote from Schelling in the notes rather than in the text. Maybe it’s more interesting for your listeners if we drill down on this than the big platitudes of, “Do more nuclear weapons make us more safe?” It goes like this. This was Schelling in an interview with WGBH Radio in 1986 in Boston.
He says, “The problem with applying game theory to nuclear war is that nuclear war, by its very nature, does not involve rational men. It can’t. What sane person would be willing to kill hundreds of millions of people, ruin the earth, and end modern civilization in order to make somebody called the enemy doesn’t win first?”
COWEN: But Schelling did favor nuclear weapons. That was his dark sense of humor, I would say.
JACOBSEN: You think what I just read was his sense of humor?
COWEN: Absolutely.
JACOBSEN: I believe it was a man in his elder years coming to the conclusion that nuclear war is insane, which is the fundamental premise that I make in the book.
COWEN: You can hold both views. It is insane, but it might be the better insanity of the ones available to us.
JACOBSEN: Yes. From my take, he, like so many others that I have interviewed, because, for some reason — call it fate and circumstance — I have spent my career interviewing men in their 80s and 90s, who are defense officials who spent their entire life making war or preventing war. I watch them share with me their reflections in that third act of their life, which are decidedly different — in their own words — than those that they would have made as a younger man.
I find that fascinating, and that’s my takeaway from the Schelling quote, that he came to terms with the fact that intellectualizing game theory — like von Neumann, who never got to his old age — is madness.
COWEN: Let’s say that Russia or China, by mistake, did a full-scale launch toward the United States, and they couldn’t call the things back, and we’re in that six-minute window, or whatever it would be with hypersonics. What do you think is the probability that we would do a full-scale launch back?
…COWEN: The word madness doesn’t have much force with me. My life is a lot of different kinds of madness. I’ve heard people say marriage is madness. A lot of social conventions seem to me to be madness.
The question is getting the least harmful form of madness out there. Then, I’m not convinced that those who wish to disarm have really made their case. Certainly, saying nuclear war is madness doesn’t persuade me. If anything, if enough people think it’s madness, we won’t get it, and it’s fine to have the nuclear weapons.
A different and quite stimulating episode.